| Swanman |
09-19-2008 03:54 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by TrebMaxx
(Post 5034952)
Fortunately, the inheritance was sizable, under 200,000, but not enough to qualify for estate tax, which BTW, the estate has to be over 2 million this year (thank you Replubicans!). This was all covered with the lawyer I used to settle the estate.
Like I said earlier, it is just me and the wife, no kids. We make a comfortable living. I write software and the wife is a Admin Assistant for the Director of one of the schools at MU. We are not uber wealthy, but not hurting at all. Our total debt is well under a $100,000 including everything, cars, mortgage, etc. I think reason for that is because we don't have any kids (not by choice, medical). It has allowed us to pay things off or pay cash for big ticket items and keep our debt low. We are also fairly modest. We don't have fancy cars or a house that is way too big for us, things like that. We live a fairly simple life.
The passing of my mother was totally unexpected, thus why I am scrambling to figure out what to do with the money she left. But, even before this happened I had my financial plans set up so that I can retire from my current job at 55 - I am 45 now. My company will pay my health insurance if you have worked 25 years and reach the age of 55. When I said retire it just means from my full time current job. I would still do B.S. work here and there, but on my own terms.
I think what some are missing on what I was trying to get opinions on. Really, it is all about the current financial crisis going on. In some ways it is great because like people say - buy low. That seems to be available in the current market. But all of the doom and gloom that is being reported has me very concerned.
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Since your are 45, I would put about 60% of the money in equities and 40% into bonds/fixed income. For your equities, I would recommend index funds/etfs. People will yell about stylized mutual funds, but over the long-term, something like 90% of the stylized mutual funds perform worse than the benchmark indices they are up against. You can get into index funds based on the S&P 500, DJIA, Russell 2000, etc. I would recommend bond index funds as well which will diversify your risk there. Plus, the index funds have very low fees by and large.
I would also recommend doing international index funds as well to further diversify, there are quite a few out there.
Right now I am 25% in an S&P 500 index fund, 25% in an international equity index fund, 10% in a Russell 2000 index fund, 10% in a GNMA bond fund, 10% in an emerging markets stock fund, 10% in an emerging markets bond fund and 10% in a commodities fund. |
